Timothy Leary vs. Daniel Quinn Essay

Below is an essay on "Timothy Leary vs. Daniel Quinn" from Anti Essays, your source for research papers, essays, and term paper examples.

Timothy Leary vs. Daniel Quinn
On October 22, 1920, Timothy Leary was born. In 1960 he became a psychologist and writer and kept this occupation throughout the sixties; he was most known, however, for advocating psychedelic drugs like LSD. He believed LSD to show therapeutic potential for use in psychiatry and marriage counseling. He made catchphrases popular that promoted his philosophy such as his most famous, "turn on, tune in, drop out". He also encouraged questioning of authority and wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts. He was arrested many times throughout the sixties and President Richard Nixon said once that Leary was “the most dangerous man in America”.
In 1983, Timothy Leary explained in greater detail what the phrase, “Turn on, Tune in, and Drop out” meant. He said that "Turn on" meant go within yourself to switch on your neural and genetic apparatus. Become responsive to the many different levels of consciousness and the exact sparks that connect them. In Leary’s opinion, drugs were one way to achieve this. "Tune in" meant to communicate accordingly with the world around you. And lastly, "Drop out"--which created the most misunderstanding--proposed a lively, selective process of disengagement from spontaneous commitments; it meant self-reliance, a discovery of your individuality, and a promise to choice and change. Although many considered Leary to be one of the most prominent, outstanding people during the counterculture of the 1960’s, his ideas were sorrowfully misinterpreted. What ended up being the conclusion of his philosophies was to, “get stoned and abandon all constructive activity”, which was not what he’d intended, and therefore, his formula led to a dead end.
Four years before Timothy Leary’s death, Daniel Quinn came out with his novel, Ishmael, and proposed a very similar idea which was to sort of, “Walk away, go tribal, think incremental.” By aiming to get almost the exact same message across, Quinn seemed to have...